Body College

Body College Learn the Art of Touch
Become a Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist (BCST)
Train in Galway and London Steve Haines has been a bodyworker for over 25 years.

He is the author of the award winning ‘Anxiety Is Really Strange’, part of a series of graphic books that include ‘Pain Is Really Strange’, ‘Trauma Is Really Strange’ and 'Touch Is Really Strange'. Understanding the science of pain and trauma has transformed his approach to healing. He has studied Yoga, Shiatsu, Craniosacral Therapy, Chiropractic, and Trauma Releasing Exercises TRE®. He teaches TRE and Cranial all over the world. His treatments use movement, education, embodied awareness, and slow touch to help people move more freely and be more present. Steve lives and works between London and Geneva. www.bodycollege.net

The latest pain science is very clear that persistent pain involves habitual fixed responses. The protective feeling tha...
24/09/2026

The latest pain science is very clear that persistent pain involves habitual fixed responses. The protective feeling that can be useful at the start to help the tissues heal can become overprotective.

At one stage the reflex to withdraw, to rest, to protect yourself from a difficult stimulus is important. For example, if you twist your ankle, you do need to rest and protect so that you can recover. That’s a useful reflex.

If your pain persists after the time for optimum healing, then the noisy signal of pain has become divorced from the actual state of the tissues.

Most of the time our bodies heal really well. Sometimes the tissues are a little thicker - there can be some scarring, and sometimes they’re a little bit more sensitive. But generally they’re fit for purpose - we can run, we can move, we can bend, we can lift, without fear.

However, in some cases, the alarm signal can hang around. We can get stuck in a state of withdrawing, and a contraction or protective reflex can take over and it becomes a bad habit.

So what can we do? I wrote my book Pain is Really Strange to explore exactly this question.

Today I’m exploring the cutting edge science that reveals how being sensitive may be how we can become less sensitive. I...
22/09/2026

Today I’m exploring the cutting edge science that reveals how being sensitive may be how we can become less sensitive. It turns out that nerves are more complex than we thought, and this can be a good thing when it comes to easing pain.

I know how overwhelming it can feel when you’re dealing with persistent pain. One of the reasons I wrote my book, Pain i...
19/09/2026

I know how overwhelming it can feel when you’re dealing with persistent pain.

One of the reasons I wrote my book, Pain is Really Strange was to turn something which can so often feel hopeless and complex into something accessible, practical and even simple.

And there is a lot of pain around: in a huge study (Breivik et al 2006) across 15 European countries, 19% of people reported living with moderate to severe pain for more than 6 months. That’s 1 in 5 people in persistent pain states, the majority for many years. Holy moly.

Over the past 20 years, I've been lucky to work with thousands of clients to overcome their chronic pain. Across the board, one of the key aspects to easing pain is helping people to understand the connection between pain and safety.

The most fundamental question your brain is concerned with is ‘am I safe right now?’. If the answer to that question is ‘no!’, then pain is an all too common output to protect.

(Our brains and nervous systems can be like the worst back seat drivers ever – always predicting danger and always trying to overprotect!).

Luckily, the latest pain science is revealing that many things contribute to people’s experience of pain, beyond our physical structure and tissues, and this is what I explore in Pain is Really Strange - which you can find using the link in my bio.

Learning to feel connected to your body is a powerful and necessary first step to healing.This is one of the reasons why...
03/09/2026

Learning to feel connected to your body is a powerful and necessary first step to healing.

This is one of the reasons why I enjoy teaching TRE - Trauma and Tension Releasing Exercises.

Think of TRE shaking as a reboot to the nervous system. In stress and trauma our brain defaults to old, habitual, protective patterns. Involuntary shaking is a burst of good news from the shaking muscles direct to the central nervous system. The signals generated when tremoring actively create new neural pathways inside the brain.

There are three main things going on when we teach TRE:

1. Education that people are not ‘mad, bad or broken’. Helping people understand how primitive protective reflexes work is very powerful. Education is an effective tool for change.

2. Training in mind-body interaction. We teach how to relate to intense feelings in a grounded and self-regulated way. TRE is about releasing tension and about 'waking the body up'. Shaking is used to support connection and find safety. There is a deep acknowledgement of dissociative states and a long, slow journey to embodied safety.

3. Shaking is a novel and interesting stimulus to a stuck organism. Sometimes its quite wonderful to let primitive reflexes run your body and to learn how to go into and out of shaking. In the right context, the feelings generated by shaking can be a powerful stimulus to come out of old, fixed habits. New stimuli, approached with safety and curiosity, can support learning and growth.

If you'd like to explore the upcoming training, please visit: www.trecollege.com


As I’ve come to understand, from my personal explorations, and decades of body work with people experiencing pain, traum...
01/09/2026

As I’ve come to understand, from my personal explorations, and decades of body work with people experiencing pain, trauma and anxiety, trauma actually emerges when bodies are stuck in over protective reflexes.

And when our bodies are stuck, we are stuck as people, because our thoughts become less flexible, our choices are more narrow, and our bodies are stuck, trying to protect us. What we might say is that old parts of the brain are stuck trying to protect us, and they change how our physiology is working. They change the fluid, chemical milieu, they change the action patterns, they change all the reflexes in the body.

There are lots of really great folklore phrases that teach us that emotions and bodies work together, there's are beautiful links in our language between emotions and the body:
My heart is broken
I can't get over this
I can't stomach that
I've got a gut wrenching decision to make.

How we make sense of these feelings is beautifully complex.

I would offer that emotions, thoughts and memories all emerge at the same time, they co-emerged in response to raw feeling states.

There's a nice technical word we can use here, called affect. Affect is the first readout of the physiological state of our body. Homeostasis - the balance of do I like this or dislike it? How calm am I? How busy do I feel? These poles of valence - of like / dislike, agitated or calm - are the raw substrate of all and all actions, as well as all thoughts, and all memories.

As a bodyworker, my goal is to help people feel more comfortable with affect, with these raw feeling states, and to learn that there is a gap between the physiological response, and the complex meanings that emerge.

I guide clients and students to cultivate that gap, and learn to slow down when we feel a little bit of tremor in our breathing, or a pounding in our chest, or a tension in our muscles. And once we’ve slowed down, to realise that what we are feeling isn't actually anger or anxiety, but rather our bodies trying to protect us. This can become a very, very powerful tool.

I have a profound trust in the wisdom of the body, particularly when it comes to working with trauma.As much of modern t...
27/08/2026

I have a profound trust in the wisdom of the body, particularly when it comes to working with trauma.

As much of modern trauma science now shows, trauma is primarily a physiological response rather than a psychological problem. To heal trauma, you don’t need to understand or remember. You also don’t need to talk about your most difficult experiences!

This is why I gravitate to embodied approaches where we work to gently heal trauma by reconnecting to your body in safe and generative ways.

If you'd like to explore our upcoming TRE one year training, please see the link in my bio.

I created this podcast to explore how can touch, movement, presence and stories help us find joy and agency. because bei...
25/08/2026

I created this podcast to explore how can touch, movement, presence and stories help us find joy and agency. because being in a body can be hard, and this feeling business is complex.

Each episode aims to help us make sense of the world of feelings inside of us and the world of possibilities around us, and the art of touch, being trauma informed and embodiment are the golden thread that weaves throughout the conversations.

I'd love to hear what you think.

Whether you’re working to support your clients to alleviate pain, anxiety, or trauma, or you want to create more freedom...
20/08/2026

Whether you’re working to support your clients to alleviate pain, anxiety, or trauma, or you want to create more freedom and ease for yourself personally, the concept of ‘flow states’ is a fascinating one.

As author Stephen Kotler states:

“Researchers now believe flow sits at the heart of almost every athletic championship, underpins major scientific breakthroughs, and accounts for significant progress in the arts.

World leaders have sung the praises of flow. Fortune 500 CEOs have built corporate philosophies around the state.

From a quality-of-life perspective, psychologists have found that the people who have the most flow in their lives are the happiest people on earth.”

As I’ve been developing and teaching ‘The Art of Touch’ – my two-year biodynamic craniosacral training - I’ve been thinking deeply about the core principles that have guided my teaching over the last decade, and cultivating a flow state is central for me.

I recommend Stephen's book, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance. It has a terrible name, but it is a great book!

Kotler explores what it takes to achieve incredible feats - such as the person who did the first double somersault instead of a single one, or the first people who slack-lined across great canyons.

He lays out three external triggers for flow states, which are available for all of us:

1. Risk - firstly, we’re more likely to achieve flow if there is an element of risk.

2. A rich / novel environment - novelty, unpredictability and complexity add to our focus. We can each work to cultivate this by actively noticing new things in the environment around us.

3. Deep embodiment - This was my main takeaway from this book. Although the felt sense of the body can disappear during flow states, it doesn’t come from a dissociative state, but rather from a profound, unconscious availability of the body.

Love the cover for the French translation of Trauma is Really Strange!
20/08/2026

Love the cover for the French translation of Trauma is Really Strange!

It’s now well understood that going slow is actually the quickest way to heal trauma. That’s why all modern trauma heali...
18/08/2026

It’s now well understood that going slow is actually the quickest way to heal trauma. That’s why all modern trauma healing focuses on teaching how to regulate intense feelings.

The truth is that feeling is a difficult business, and if it is hard to feel, it is hard to heal. Our feeling states are often hidden, rarely simple, and sometimes scary.

The good news is that feeling is a skill that can be taught. Embodiment tools can help us develop our capacity to feel, which is incredibly useful in resolving trauma.

These three practices are improtant things to remember when working to heal trauma - they will assist you in developing your skills and strength to help you build a strong, resilient container to hold your trauma.

If you'd like to explore TRE - Trauma and Tension Releasing Exercises - please come and explore our upcoming training at www.trecollege.com.

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